Theory of multi-layered narratives

Having tried to write about my inner development, I have come to understand one thing clearly.

I have been able to talk about my inner being through several stories. Each of the stories reminds me in its own way of the experiences and events of my youth. This trip through stories, after having allowed me to attribute some meaning to those experiences and events, brings me back to the present. Sometimes the stories I have relayed preserved their consistency; sometimes it seemed that they contradict one another. Some portions of the stories I have been able to faithfully recount as I still, even now, vividly remember them, while others are little fictitious memories narrated by the present author.

This piece-by-piece method of recalling my inner development has opened my eyes to the various cross-sections that lie therein. All of those cross-sections, by revealing each their entirely different contexts, have created a fictional world.

“My inner layers” do not exist as different strata within my heart piled prudently one upon another. Rather, “my inner layers” are the different stories of my inner being and the various means by which I am able to communicate that inner being, so that they first become visible. The various expectations and motives about which the “multi-layered aspects of speech,” have been mentioned, comprise precisely “my inner layers.”

I have been able to reach the different layers within my being for the first time by talking about them in a multi-layered fashion. And this is one of the crucial meanings of what it is to be “multi-layered.”

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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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Telephone conversation and solitude

Also, I used to make long phone calls all the time.

Late at night, I sometimes would blather on for almost three hours. In the middle of my conversation, I would get hungry, make myself some ramen, and then keep on talking. My telephone was located in the center of my six-tatami room. When I was on the phone, I would lose sight of my small, dirty room, and it would be as though the person I was on the phone with and I were floating somewhere inside of that fanciful space.

In my own room, with my isolated solitude and one telephone line, I am connected with another solitary human being. I lived at a distance where I could easily have met that other person; however, we chose to speak over the phone. If it started to rain here, it would soon be raining there as well. As we shared the same city, Tokyo, we wanted to remain connected electronically.

What can this be?

I have always been turning this question over deeply in my soul. When I think about bioethics or the philosophy of a personal world, this question continues to linger and reverberate deep in my heart. After passing thirty years of age and moving to Kyoto, my thinking on this topic suddenly began to crystallize and I produced a book on it.

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Living in Tokyo, a gentle city

Actually, electronic media has not been chosen as a new topic of research. It became an object of my intense interest when I left for Tokyo as an eighteen year-old. To tell the truth, I have been ruminating over this topic since my late teens. When my job took me to Kyoto and my life became a bit more settled, I was able to concentrate more on my studies and firm up my thinking on issues, leading, finally, to a more productive output. I was also struck by the thought in my early thirties that if I did not produce something on this issue, I would never be able to do so. As one gets older and more mature, he can no longer write on these topics. Furthermore, I needed to write while still moved by the impulses of Eros.

While living in Tokyo for 12 years, I became convinced of the idea that the field of electronic media was something especially appropriate for Tokyo, a “Tokyo-like” phenomenon. I came to Tokyo from the countryside to begin life on my own. I had no real desire to make friends at university, and what’s more I had no money with which to play around. Soon after arriving, I stopped attending class. Before long, I was staying up late in my room, gnawing on bread, laughing by myself at the late-night TV and radio shows. I used to hit the movie houses, PIA movie magazine in hand, out until dawn, when at last I would sleep the days away. I lived in poverty and solitude. However, the city called Tokyo possessed an atmosphere that would soothingly envelope the loneliness of the college student. Tokyo was a gentle city. That gentleness is the facility of an “information” metropolis. Late-night television, radio, news magazines, movie houses, the convenience stores that, even in the wee hours of the morning, don’t sleep, the melodious sound of the trucks on Loop Seven, the porn-selling vending machines, the white, floating telephone booths. It is like a lively flood of “information” into which you can thrust yourself, and ever since I started living in that fanciful world, the city of Tokyo has never failed to kindly welcome me.

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Hitoshi Nagai and solipsism

During this period, I met the philosopher Hitoshi Nagai, a lecturer at Housei University (now a professor at Shinshu University). Right after that, he published a philosophical treatise, The Metaphysics of “I” (Keiso Shobo, 1986), which contained an original expansion of solipsism. This work will certainly live on as a masterpiece in the annals of Japanese philosophical history. At the time the work was published, the concept of “I” brought up by Nagai in his development of solipsism had not become a topical subject in the field of philosophy; now, however, the new generation of young Japanese philosophers are paying much attention to that idea and a workshop has even been established at meetings of scientific philosophers.

Though Nagai and I are looking at the same field of philosophical issues, his superiority in understanding these issues and his publications have truly astounded me. At the time it was clear that he had the linguistic capabilities that I lacked, and the ideas in the 200 some odd pages that I had written would have to be rethought from their very foundation.

Nagai knew that I was writing a manuscript, and so he introduced me to Keiso Shobo Publishing. After talking with the editors at Keiso, and seeing that “The Philosophy of a Personal World” was still far from completion, they requested that before finishing that work, I should write a piece on “bioethics;” the result was the publication of An Invitation to the Study of Life.

Even after that I continued to write on “The Philosophy of a Personal World.” Masao Kurosaki made it possible for me to deliver a presentation on it at a PIN Philosophy Seminar. Shortly after that, however, I stopped writing on it, and it has sat sleeping on my bookshelf for quite some time.

Two years after having come to Kyoto, I suddenly remembered Osamu Tezuka’s Firebird, and realized that both my work “The Philosophy of a Personal World” and “Life Studies” shared the same motives and objectives. Furthermore, at that time, after pondering for a while, I gained a new perspective on how best to grasp Nagai’s solipsism theory and connect it to my own life studies research. As I was thinking about these things, I came across a certain type of mistake in Nagai’s solipsism, wrote and presented a critical paper on it. That paper, “The meaning of the uniqueness of one’s form of existence in this universe,” which was included ina collection of essays edited by none other than Nagai (Etica Lectures “Self and Others.” Showado, 1993). Though authors such as Yoshimichi Nakajima have started even referencing this debate between Nagai and myself (Morioka) (“Philosophy Textbook,” Kodansha, 1995), we still have to work together to determine how the debate should be interpreted (Motoyoshi Irifuji and Asaji Hirayama are already developing the ideas in a unique manner). Anyway, I still need to reexamine the 200 pages sleeping on my bookshelf and revise them in a particular area of life studies.

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Osamu Tezuka and life studies

Thinking about it now, I would assert that Tezuka’s Firebird can serve as a sort of progenitor/prototype for what I propose as “Life Studies.” The firebird, the continuous flow of life, embracing everything, salvages people who are trembling with fear, being suspended in the midst ofthe universe, and gives them meaning in life. On the other hand, Tezuka depicts people who reject this salvation, choosing to remain irreplaceable individual humans living here and now, and trying to obtain immortality by using technologies. “Civilization” and “History” are merely the tracks of human beings in their strenuous efforts and perpetual frustrations in trying to return to eternal existence from which they have been born as mortal beings.

I believe we can credit Osamu Tezuka with the true genesis of Life Studies.

I did not realize this until extremely recently, though; rather I had completely eliminated any recollection of the Firebird from my consciousness. I was diverted from the path of bringing philosophical meditations inspired by the thought of “my death” together with the notion of the Firebird’s “life” at some point in my teens.

Instead I began to concentrate on the idea of what my existence and that of other people was. Although I will not go into detail about this, I realized that I would, at some point, have to deeply examine this fundamental problem in philosophy, that I would have to confront the solipsist thesis sooner or later. Some people are inclined to think that it might be only “me” that actually has an inner consciousness because it is totally unclear whether you have “consciousness”=“another I”=“the other mind” inside your body.

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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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Death and manga, Osamu Tezuka

The place where young people encounter “death” is in manga. In the last issue of Devilman, the creature was the very image of death, a disembodied torso. In the background angels are dancing on the sea. Also, in the final episode of Joe of Tomorrow, death lies in a ring.

A work that fills young boy’s hearts with dread is Firebird by Osamu Tezuka. The Firebird is one of the few special beings that transcend space and time and have eternal life, but have taken shape (for us humans to perceive). The human races, in their particular histories, and in each their own way, have encountered the Firebird and have tried to acquire its immortality. Each also continues to fail. Humans have a limited existence (are mortal), and while we all fear death, in the end too, we all die. The Firebird is a symbol of the undulating flow of how each individual comes to understand and ultimately to embrace death in the “life” of the eternal. Each one of us is born into our mortal existence from that eternal life and are absorbed back into its flow at our death. Tezuka somberly paints a picture of how mortal humans, in various ways, try and are perpetually frustrated in their attempts to grasp eternal life. At the same time, however, those frustrating attempts at immortality can be seen as precisely one of the aspects that make human beings human beings.

The limitlessness of space in eternity that allows for only silence in Pascal’s Pensees degenerates into the warm existence into which each death is absorbed in Tezuka’s Firebird. (Of course, in Pensees, the role of the cause of this state of events is played by “God.”)

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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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What happens after you die?

I don’t recall exactly when I was suddenly struck by these ideas, but it must have been at the end of my elementary school days or in junior high school. I know that I tried to forget the more terrifying of the questions because, first of all, there was nobody with whom I could seek counsel, but more importantly, it had become an obsession that I felt could not be disclosed. As I watched the adults around me, I would tell myself that once one becomes an adult, these problems would naturally disappear.

“I’m afraid of dying;” “What happens after you die?” It is almost inconceivable that junior high school boys will have such conversations about death. At that age, their main interest becomes of girls and sex. As for my inner development, as I grew I developed somewhat of an aversion to sexual impulses as the haunting notion of “my death” would not leave my mind. The memories I have of my junior high days are of a depressing, painful period.

Whenever I would solve math problems, become absorbed in a novel, or listen to music, I could forget about this world. Math, novels and music encompassed my entire psychological life. The pleasure I derived from solving math puzzles set the foundation for how my intellectual personality would develop. That foundation was the excitement that accompanies the surprising flash of knowledge that penetrated my confused mind. This is one of the periods of my life in which I truly felt satisfied.

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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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Fear of death

Unable to comprehend either the vastness or the minuteness of this universe, the human being remains suspended somewhere in the space between. We are born of the nothingness incomprehensible to each of us individuals and find death in the midst of the limitlessness. I have absolutely no idea why I am living here and now. I don’t know why the world is the way it is. I have been thrust into existence and am coldly surrounded by the limitless space.

When humans cannot fully grasp the foundations of existence, we become encumbered by the feeling known as “fear.”

I was a young boy when I acquired that fear of death.

Pensees grabbed a hold of that young boy’s heart firmly and guided him alongthe road of philosophy. I was haunted by the almost unbearable discovery, “my own death.” I averted my eyes from it, only to find myself confronted with it again over and over. This relentless fear preoccupied my early development. I believe it was when I resolved that I would never be able to flee the idea of my own death that I truly became a philosopher. The ultimate basis for why I continue to pursue my current academic endeavors lies here.


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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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Why does this world exist? Why do I exist?

When I read these famous snippets hidden in the latter half of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a difficult treatise in the field of logic on the relationship between proposition and logic, Wittgenstein became the most influential philosopher on my scholastic development. I desired to find what remains once the logic of arguments has been exhausted, what is found on the other side of that which is said, “that inexpressible beyond.” I believe that depending only on what remains unsaid, one will find something there. “Solipsism,” “death,” “the world’s existence,” and “mysteriousness” – what the philosopher ultimately discovers after thoroughly examining a thing or an idea through logic, the part that remains when it can no longer be expressed using logic, what naturally appears after such an examination, that mysterious “kernel of existence.”

One of the reasons I was shocked at these items described by Wittgenstein was that he stuck with the same problem as I have and continued with since my teens. Also, I suffered terribly being unable to communicate my ideas in written from. I was shocked in finding out that the problem that plagued my mind for so long had been so clearly elucidated by someone at the beginning of this century.

Why does this world exist? Why do I exist? Why do I have a distinct way of living? (solipsism) How can I reach other people? (The philosophical dilemma of ‘other minds’)


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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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